For those who do not know this, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action earned Elinor Ostrom a Nobel Peace Prize in Economics. This book, by the author of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is of that caliber. A later book,, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life is easier to read — if you have time for only one go with the latter.

The core message of this book is that you cannot predict or control high impact low probability events, but you can downsize, localize, you can decentralize, and in so doing make much of the ecology “antifragile.”

If you want to double your life-span – in my case as a 65-year-old I can reasonably aspire to living to be 120 or so, perhaps long, those starting younger can aspire to live toward 200 years of age – this is the single most revolutionary and serious book you can read to that end and is the capstone document from over a decade of radical free thinking proven in medical experimentation that has been documented in over 150 peer-reviewed journal publications.

By its nature this book is also an indictment of the largely retarded Western “scientific” and “medical” industries that are both totally corrupt and totally ignorant – on the one hand they are structured to sell artificial remediation and surgery while ignoring 95% of the natural and alternative cures available at next to no cost; and on the other they are an incestuous self-licking ice cream cone that thrives on 1% (published) or 1% (written) or 1% (known).

Some books are so far out of my personal ability to digest in detail that I very rapidly convert to my scanning mode with one big question that I ask on every page: does this book and its author pass the smell test with me, and would I, if President, want to trust this author to help implement his ideas without necessarily understanding them in detail?

Not only is the answer for this book and this author a resounding YES, but on pages 31-32 I have a note, “Holy Shit! Could DT be doing all this?” Those two pages outline ten great deals that Donald Trump could be pursuing: peace, jobs, sound-money, Glass-Steagall, federalist, regulatory, liberty, health-care, fiscal, and governance.

It has been very distressful for me, as a professional intelligence officer committed to truth and transparency, to find so many of my colleagues absolutely livid – constipated with anger, impotent in every sense of the word – when confronted with the success off WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange is the epitome of truth, transparency, and trust, the sub-title of The Open Source Everything Manifesto that places Julian and the good works of his thousands of volunteers in context. The post-Western, post-Google Internet begins and ends, in my view, with Julian Assange, myself, William Binney, and John McAfee. The WikiLeaks “model” – while it can be broadened and scaled up – is the perfect manifestation of what Tom Atlee has called The Tao of Democracy. WikiLeaks is Collective Intelligence in its purest form: no barriers, no lies.

Reality bats last — the US military has not been designed in the context of a Grand Strategy, nor has it been designed with any attention at all to Global Reality.

The US military is too slow, too heavy, too expensive, too complex, and spread too thin to be effective — it cannot deter, defend, or defeat. From the F-35 in the US Air Force to the USS Gerald Ford in the US Navy to the varied cancelled and cumbersome systems of the US Army, the US military is good for one thing and one thing only: enriching the military-industrial complex and the banks behind that complex.